M. Ward: Hold Time

This is a skinny album. The production is some kind of thin-air, upper-echelons-of-the-atmosphere style affair, the lyrics are lean and good songs are thin on the ground.

There are a few notable exceptions to this. The warm, early morning of 'Oh Lonesome Me' rolls along "fancy free" like Jack Johnson strung out on mushrooms. 'Epistemology' is quite charming, a euphoric folk rocker about Catholic upbringing. It's tinged with mandolin, plaintive Italian cinema strings, some slide guitar and a few meaningless lyrical ellipticals which bring Dylan to mind:

"And if you're trying to sing an old song,
"And you're getting all the words wrong,
"Well you're just following along too closely in the book."

The opening strums of 'For Beginners' are quite likeable; nice nylon-string fills over a Tex-Mex shuffle, but then comes one of a few frequent exercises in badness. 'Never Had Nobody Like You' makes you think that it's a light-hearted glam-rock swagger, with flanged drum machine, softened overdriven guitars and lyrical references to Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. It's the kind of ode to new-love which could be quite good fun in the hands of Vetiver perhaps, even when the "It's just like A, B, C, now it's just like 1, 2, 3, yeah yeah" chorus rears its pus-filled head. Underneath all the studio effects, though, it's a seriously bland heard-these-tricks-before number. It might work as the soundtrack to Spy Kids! It has some kind of Randy Newman circa Toy Story thing going on.

A good number of these tunes sound like album closers. The record actually sounds pretty defeated throughout, it's quite sad and I hope the man's alright. Have you heard that last track on Springsteen's Ghost of Tom Joad? The one that strings together a barrow load of salt of the earth wisdomisms like "the early bird catches the fucking worm, Rome wasn't built in a day" (please note, he doesn't sound angry, it's all gravy, the "fucking" thing is an eyebrow raised humour moment, not bitterness!). Well quite a few of these are trying to capture that feeling to varying degrees of success, which gives "Outro" quite a lot to do.

And my goodness, does it try its best. It starts out all soft calypso until some kind of desperate longing starts seeping out slowly, like sap from the treacle tree. It utilises every tool Ward has ever gazed upon to tell you that the credits are rolling, the film is over and you've just been touched by whatever came before. The mournful guitar solo puts all the pain out there like wispy clouds, then dives down into some very black and heavy caverns before popping its head back out for a little more Clapton school of note-bending (with queer strained facial expressions one hopes). The cherry on the cake: the short nylon string finale. That's it folks. Maybe someone's dead, maybe someone's driving a sports-car along a mountain road, and maybe an A-bomb just went off in 1887. I don't know, it doesn't matter. I love this instrumental composition, it's flawless. But then I'm not a great fan of Wards dry quivering voice.

'Fisher of Men' takes the reverberated chug of early Johnny Cash (it's been stolen so many times that it's not really theft anymore) and a slightly interesting string score that pulls a few edible rabbits out of the bag. But the album is pretty soulless. The songs take well-worn symbols, stock footage guitar licks, mid-tempo beats and then mashes them together to make a ragtag gang of mongrels. A few of them show signs of intelligence, but crossbreeding seems to have bled the life and lust out of them. They're almost blander than the Prozac substitute (aka the She and Him album) that he made with Zooey Deschanel last year.

Hold Time only escapes boredom's ranch when it starts to canter ('Epistemology') or sits dead still on the spot and goes nowhere ('Oh Lonesome Me') instead of wandering aimlessly like the very poor "Blake's View". I guess it's good organic cafe music? What strikes me, despite not being familiar with his whole career, is that M. Ward seems like he is probably capable of a whole lot better than this.